SELF TITLED

Clem Baker-Finch

Friday 9th December 2011 - Saturday 11th February 2012

CCAS Gorman

There’s something about photographs that makes people trust them. Clem Baker-Finch questions this inherent believability by exploring and exploiting the use of photographs in trashy magazines. Baker-Finch appropriates an image cropped from a magazine cover, and lets the words speak for themselves through the image. It’s all in the process: a computer program that he devised picks out the average colour of where a letter will go and writes the next letter in that colour, so that the words are woven tightly into the image. Even though these images are from cuttings, you can’t escape their magazine context-headlines, bar codes and inset images all push their way into view.

Baker-Finch also significantly enlarges these small cuttings from throwaway magazines, further highlighting the gravity, tragedy and also the humour in these modern relics of celebrity culture. But Baker-Finch isn’t being polemical; he is just making an observation, and like the readers of trashy magazines, the viewer must choose what they want to believe. (Annika Harding, 2011)

Image: Clem Baker-Finch, Affair, 2011 Inkjet print, 112cm x 93cm